From left, visitors Morris and Cindi Doss check out railroadscenes in Union Station.

Harrison shows off the interior of a scene in his group's setup thatcovers 1,000 square feet in Union Station downtown.

Tarry Harrison of the Platte Valley & Western Model Railroad Club helps one of the trains along Friday as it passes old downtown Denver,one of many scenes in historic model-railroad layouts in the basement of Union Station.

The two development teams fighting to win the contract for the redevelopment of Denver’s Union Station — groups with fancy suits, big plans and deep pockets — find themselves wooing a small group of model railroaders who lurk in the dank basement of the grand old building.

These are people who, not long ago, would have literally told the big shots where to get off.

“We had members who were definitely anti-public,” said Tarry Harrison, superintendent of the Platte Valley & Western Model Railroad Club. “They had zero social skills and psychotic personalities.”

But now, the Platte Valley group and their fellow dungeon denizens, the Denver Society of Model Railroaders, are all the rage — or at least they will be whether it is the Union Station Alliance or the Union Station Neighborhood Co. that lands the contract to redevelop the historic station.

The Regional Transportation District is expected to announce Tuesday which team will lead the transformation.

But rather than being forced to vacate the premises when work begins — as seemed likely at one time — both development groups say the model railroads will not only stay but will become one of the stars of the show.

“It’s an amazing thing to see when you figure that they have been there for decades, with generations of members,” said Frank Cannon of the Union Station Neighborhood Co.

His group proposed a $21.1 million conversion that would add a market, a bar and other retail.

“We want to make the experience for people visiting them as inviting and welcoming as it can be,” Cannon said.

Dana Crawford of the Union Station Alliance, which proposed to spend $48 million transforming the transportation hub into a boutique hotel with retail, called the railways “fantastic.”

“We want to make it more of a museumlike place. They’re a huge asset to the community, and we want to give them more exposure because they aren’t seen enough,” Crawford said.

That part is certainly true.

While Gov. John Hickenlooper used to bring his son Teddy down when he was mayor of the city, and boffo business has occurred on random occasions such as the 2008 NCAA hockey Frozen Four and later that summer during the Democratic National Convention, for the most part the clubs exist in virtual isolation.

For a time, that didn’t matter to the membership of the clubs, which, the story goes, got the basement space because they were the only people willing to wade through the muck and clean up damage caused by the Cherry Creek flood in the 1930s.

Content to marvel at their own work — wondrous re-creations of the railroads and the towns they passed through throughout Colorado — the clubs were, for the most part, a painfully private concern.

“I brought my grandsons down here once,” Harrison said, “and I thought some of the members’ heads were going to explode.”

When the developers began poring over plans for Union Station redevelopment, with their talk of spiral staircases and glass walls, it seemed neither group had much use for the model railroaders.

However, as time passed and the developers met with the clubs, both groups realized the possibilities of building an attraction around the spreads — the Platte Valley group’s covers about 1,000 square feet, while the Denver Society operates the Colorado Midland Railway, covering 6,500 square feet.

It also probably didn’t hurt that RTD, which will contribute $17 million to the winning project, is a big proponent of model railroads.

“We look at that as them giving us an unwritten mandate, you might say, to be open more, to welcome the public more, to draw people to the building,” said Platte Valley secretary Chris Rand. “We’re a draw. We get 200 to 300 people on our open houses on the last Friday of the month.”

This Friday, when the layouts are open to coincide with Denver’s Grand Illumination of holiday lights, Rand expects the visitor tally to reach 2,500 to 3,000 “because of all the other events downtown.”

“It’s very attractive for people who know about it, and RTD looks at us as another featured attraction of the building,” Rand said.

Lights on!

The Platte Valley & Western and the Colorado Midland Railway models will be open for public inspection Friday, coinciding with the Denver Grand Illumination at 5:30 p.m., which lights up buildings across the city from Union Station to the City and County Building and the D&F Tower in between.

The displays will be open from 4 to 10 p.m. and are in the basement of Union Station, 1701 Wynkoop St. Take the elevator or south stairs to the basement.

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